


Grapes Into Wine

by joosetta



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn
Genre: Gen, Gen Fic, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-17
Updated: 2011-03-17
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:46:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joosetta/pseuds/joosetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grapes Into Wine

“Renato?”

It was so hot you could spit on the tarmac and watch it dry. Renato could hear his mother calling, but he ignored her. He was busy, crouched by the church wall. He had three rocks, all about fist sized; the right weight. It was almost evening; the shadows lengthening, but the ground still hot from baking in the midday sun.

Renato’s target was moving across the scrubby yard before the church, meandering carelessly. Renato always won when he competed with his classmates at rock throwing. None of them knew how someone with such thin arms could throw so hard.

Renato knew. When the others threw they didn’t understand that the purpose of the stone in their grip was to hit something. They threw as if it were a matter of distance, rather than a potential force. They weren’t prepared for the consequences of  such a throw.  

Renato was prepared.  His target had paused,  right in the window of his range, away from the glare of the setting sun. He shifted the first rock in his grip, tensed his arm. He narrowed his eyes. He threw.

It was so silent, the cat barely looked up from washing its belly. It yowled as it was struck, knocked back, limp like a rag doll. Renato didn’t need to check to see if it was dead. The blood from its tiny, cracked skull looked black in the waning sunlight.

“Renato!” his father bellowed, and that got him going. Renato was only five, and his dad had broken his arm for less than this, before.

\---

Renato killed his first man when he was thirteen. He didn’t kill much of note before that; birds and vermin, neighbourhood strays. When he was ten, he watched a kid drown in the brackish water of the creek, but that hadn’t been his fault. He watched and didn’t feel much of anything. 

He didn’t feel bad when he killed the man either.  It had been some petty criminal, collecting for his boss. Renato had bothered him for some reason - maybe he had just objected to Renato’s face, maybe he didn’t like the easy confidence Renato had when everyone else in the village had been afraid.

This man made the mistake of drawing a gun on Renato,  waving it in his face like it was some sort of badge. Renato was good at dodging; he was good at taking things that weren’t his, and he turned the table fast enough.

Renato had never fired a gun before, but it was just like the rocks. He understood that the purpose of the bullet was to kill, and he fired knowing that. The bullet did what it was supposed to do.

\---

Renato got himself a gun and spent his days peppering the tree in his backyard with perfect shots. It was an old tree,  unable to grow olives any more, gnarled and curled in on itself. The village was like that:  Too old and weathered to produce fruit; just a dead thing, baking in the sun. Renato wanted to leave, go to the city, but his mother was here. The only thing between her and the brunt of his father’s temper was Renato himself.

“Why do you like doing such a horrible thing?” his mother asked him once, as he practiced his aim. The gun felt like a part of his arm already, an extension of his flesh and blood. Renato didn’t tell his mother that he thought his purpose was to fire a gun, his purpose to kill people.

Two men came through the village from the city. One of them sold Renato a clip for his gun, watched him with shrewd narrow eyes. They beat up the owner of the liquor store, and Renato considered killing them. The night they left though, Renato’s father beat his mother bloody and Renato killed him, instead.

\---

In the city, Renato was nobody,  just like he had always wanted. This was no rural village where everyone knew your name, the streets were filled with tipped over trash-cans and unfriendly faces.  He got a job running between a bar and a betting parlour with messages, and made enough money for one room in a hostel. Tourists came through it all the time, complaining about the heat and the traffic, sunburned and disgruntled. Renato wondered what they had been expecting.

He loved the city. Beneath all the beauty, a history of grandeur and glory, art that reached up to touch heaven, beneath all that. This city was the place where people like Renato were found, where death was just a step in a bigger picture.

He shot three men in a brawl at the bar; three perfect shots. He shot so fast that one of the men fighting them still threw a punch, surprised when his opponent slid to the floor with his brain leaking out onto the cheap carpet.

The next Sunday, Renato was hauled out of mass and thrown in front of his boss, a man with rings glittering on every finger.

“Perhaps you can give me a hand,” the boss said, flanked on both sides by men twice Renato’s size and twice his age. “Can you guess which one?”

Renato knew what he meant. He help up his right hand up, palm out, then with a twitch of his lips formed a pistol with his fingers, like children might if they were playing mafia.

Renato wasn’t playing anymore.

\---

Renato stole a hat from his first hit. He wasn’t an important guy, someone who had sold some guns to someone from another family, just someone the boss didn’t trust anymore. He had a cheap apartment for such a busy guy, but his hat was good quality, lined with silk. It fit over the mess of Renato’s hair nicely. It made him look the part. 

After he cleaned up, he went down to the bar and ordered himself a drink, even though he was sixteen and slight enough to pass for much younger. He watched the rest of the men fooling around, playing cards and trading jokes, and wondered if he was missing something. They called him family too, but he never felt like it.

Renato thought there was maybe something other people had that made them care when they killed things, made them laugh and joke and play cards. He wasn’t concerned, because when he killed people he was simply fulfilling his destiny. He was a bullet that had been fired a long time ago. There was nowhere for him to go but onwards.

\---

He made a name for himself, not a real name and not his own. It was more that people knew who to fear, and knew who to pay. 

Women liked him, and Renato liked them well enough. After sex he cleaned his guns, because sex made him feel restless, and restlessness made him crave the simplicity of a hit. The woman thought it was cute, a mafia hitman barely past boyhood, cleaning his guns in his undershirt and briefs. 

One woman liked to play with his hair, twist it around her fingers.  “Don’t you do anything for fun?” she asked, curling his hair around his ears. It was raining outside, the water had washed the blood down the cobblestones, the thunder had camouflaged Renato’s gunshot. He closed his eyes.

“What kind of things?” he asked. 

“You know, dancing, gambling, the movies? Drinking?  Are you a man without any vices, Renato?”

He liked to kill things, but Renato didn’t think that was the sort of thing that counted as a vice.

\---

Renato’s boss was small change, but he had ambitions, and there were people in the way. Renato took care of them like a right hand should - pulled the trigger, cleaned up afterwards. He didn’t do any of the talking, didn’t bother himself with the money or the negotiations, didn’t  oversee the handling of goods. He was a merchant of death and nothing else, and as long as his boss kept him in work, he stayed where he was.

They were expanding operations down to the coast, but the boss was a little fish in a shark tank and someone was bound to get eaten. The biggest shark of all, the Vongola family - a house that had hands all over Italy- smelled blood, and Renato finally met his match.

The Vongola came while the family were sleeping off the night’s liquor. The bar was still under a cloud of stale cigarette smoke. Renato was drinking alone, twisting his hair around his ears, thinking about that girl, about whether he really had any vices.

They took the house down from the top, the boss died first, coughing blood over his rings and onto his faux antique desk. No-one between him and Renato was any match for a Vongola, and they rushed down the stairs and into the bar without opposition, a whisper of knives and guns.

“Oi oi,” one of them began, “It’s that hitman with no heart.”   They looked like a waste of space, and Renato wondered how an undisciplined rabble like them could be so strong.

The bar was a mess of shattered bottles and blood, but Renato was quick. The fire fight lasted as long as it took for him to take a hostage, the smallest of the Vongola - a slip of a boy with his heart thumping in his throat.

They all seized up, as if the idea of losing a comrade tore them right through. Renato almost just killed the kid outright to see the look on their faces.

“Shit,” the boy hissed, struggling fiercely. Renato wondered what he believed in - what made him live in such a deadly world if he was afraid to die. Renato was looking down the barrel of six guns and he felt no less or more alive than he did when he was fucking a girl, when he was eating his breakfast.

“Let him go,” one of the Vongola barked. His eyes were glittering with rage, but Renato just closed his finger tighter around his own trigger. There was a pause, intent hanging thick in the air along with the smoke and sickly smell of death.

It happened all at once, the boy struggling in Renato’s grip, reaching for a gun that Renato hadn’t seen before. The other Vongola shot as Renato ducked; bullets thudding into the wood of the bar. The kid wrestled with him, their two guns clutched in clenched fists, neither of them with any advantage. 

In the end, the gun sounded almost distant as it went off, even though it was pointed right between Renato’s eyes. 

As he died, for the first time in his life, Renato regretted.

\--- 

Renato regretted not understanding what made people fight for each other, he regretted never feeling fear or sorrow. He regretted that he had no vices, that he had never loved anyone. Renato regretted taking so many lives without purpose, without understanding his real destiny.

Renato regretted not living one moment of his 19 years, and so he was given another chance.

\---

The Vongola boss was not what the hitman had expected. The Varia drove him out into the countryside, the kind of scenery that all those disgruntled, sunburned tourists bought on postcards. The lake was a glimmer of deep blue in the distance, and out on the lawn children were playing, dressed for a party.

The boss smiled out at them from his office, only one ring decorating his clasped hands.

“It seems one of our bullets got a little lost,” the old man said, eyes twinkling. The hitman resisted the urge to press two fingers to his forehead, where the lost bullet had entered. "I’m glad though, it would have been a shame to waste such a young life.”

The hitman didn’t say anything. He still wasn’t sure how he would do anything from now on. He still wasn’t sure exactly what he had learned.

“My men told me you were a little confused to find yourself in the center of the city with no clothes on. I assume you learned a lesson?” 

“Yes,” the hitman finally found his voice.

“Well,” Vongola began, rubbing his moustache. “I suppose you will have to develop a sense of humour, if you want to work with us.”

The hitman had never had a sense of humour, and never put much value in one, but right then, he felt a lot like laughing. Outside the children were still playing, and their scattered squeals washed into the room with the breeze.

”Now,” the boss, tapped his walking-stick against the rim of his wide oak table. “Since you’ll be working for me now, what shall I call you?”

The hitman thought about it for a long time, then raised his hand, palm open, and said, “Reborn.”

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 08/07/2008. Betaed by myrafur


End file.
